[1] Council Boosts Funding For Controversial Fish Survival Study, Questions Others

The Northwest Power and Conservation Council has offered more financial support to an ambitious Canadian project that tracks young salmon sporting $300 acoustic tags down rivers and up the coast to Alaska in an attempt to find out where they die.

At the same time, it questioned the continuation of another group's 10-year study that compares upriver/downriver survival of hatchery chinook, and has been trying to prove that Snake River fish die off at higher rates than downriver fish because they pass more dams.

To bolster his case, Canadian researcher David Welch (Kintama Research) even presented preliminary results of his 2006 research in comments sent to the Council earlier this month to answer questions from the science panel that reviewed this year's spate of fish and wildlife proposals. His results aren't going to be officially released until November, at a Corps of Engineers' research review in Portland.

Welch had asked for $1.5 million annually over the next three years. However, a group of fish and wildlife managers tasked with reviewing mainstem proposals rejected the project, saying it didn't address primary management questions related to Columbia Basin hydro operations, and that knowing more about fish movement in the ocean wouldn't contribute much to life cycle studies necessary for hydro operations. Other critics don't buy Welch's assumption that all the migrating smolts travel along the continental shelf, where his receiver arrays are strung east to west. They say there's no guarantee that all tagged fish will be detected, but that some could easily swim around the arrays.

The Power Council originally recommended funding at half the requested level, but Welch said the money wouldn't be enough to answer two basic questions--whether barging improves the survival of Snake River spring chinook, and whether the Snake fish show evidence of delayed mortality once they are out of the hydro system.

In comments posted on the council's website on Oct. 6, Welch said, "the answer to both questions appears to be 'no'." But he added the caveat that his data seem to show that while barged fish from the Snake initially do as well as inriver migrants, an additional month in the ocean kills them off faster than if they had migrated inriver.

Welch also said his research has found no difference in mortality between fish migrating from the Snake and the Yakima rivers, when tracked all the way to the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Fish from the Yakima deal with four fewer dams than the Snake migrants.

For many years, most state and tribal fish managers supported the notion that the Snake fish died off at a higher rate than downstream stocks because they suffered more stress from passing more dams--especially from systems built to bypass fish around turbines. But there was no way to prove it since the fish didn't die until they left the hydro system.

It's been impossible to tackle such an assumption until recently, but with the advent of new technologies such as pit-tags and acoustic-tag research, some folks are getting closer to an answer. But pit-tag researchers, who can't detect the fish in the open ocean without a net, must wait until salmon return as adults to estimate overall survival of each group, and have no way of pinpointing mortality in the deep. Acoustic tags, on the other hand, have the ability to show survival in nearly real time because receiver arrays are stretched across the width of the continental shelf at several sites up the coast.

Another important element of Welch's research goes to the heart of an assumption held by many state and tribal fish managers, that the dams themselves have an adverse effect on all fish that must deal with them. Welch's group also tracks inriver survivals of different chinook, coho sockeye and steelhead stocks in other rivers like B.C.'s Fraser, where no dams hinder fish passage.

The Canadian researchers have now begun to estimate juvenile survivals of a spring chinook stock to the mouth of the Fraser. In 2005, they estimated chinook survival through the 250 km stretch at about 40 percent, similar to survival of Snake River migrants that transit a much longer stretch and pass eight mainstem dams as well before they reach the estuary.

But not everyone is keen on Welch's work. The state of Oregon weighed in recently with its own recommendations on mainstem proposals, and supported funding his proposal at only half the original request, per an earlier recommendation by the council's own staff. But Washington's two council members, Tom Karier and Larry Cassidy, along with Idaho council member Judi Danielson, expressed strong support for boosting Welch's budget at their October 17 meeting in Helena. Montana.

Cassidy said at the meeting that Welch's work is "very important." Karier later told NW Fishletter that it was the council's duty to support this type of work, which compared Columbia/Snake fish survivals with the survival of salmon that migrated down rivers without any dams, such as the Fraser.

Welch did not beat around the bush. He told the council that his preliminary results show no evidence that the hydro system causes any less survival of the Snake fish than the Yakima fish, which according to some reports, have shown five times better smolt-to-adult return rates. NMFS, for example, has questioned the high SARs for the Yakima fish. In a 2005 technical memo on dam effects, the agency suggested that recent pit tag research showed similar SARs to wild Snake River fish.

"While we caution that our first-year results should be viewed as tentative," said Welch, "they strongly suggest that the ocean plays the critical role in the management and conservation of Columbia River salmon stocks, and that ignoring these issues leads to more blame being ascribed to the hydro system than is, in fact, appropriate. This has consequences for both the science and management--in terms of time and money lost on, in some cases, answering the wrong questions."

Welch's 2006 data show that each group of Snake fish, whether inriver or barged, exhibited "substantially less" survival in the 560-km stretch between Willapa Bay (southern Washington coast) and Vancouver Island than in the entire 960-km distance out to the Willapa receiver array from the Snake. It also showed significantly higher survivals for Snake River barged fish than for inriver migrating Snake smolts.

Survival of the two Yakima groups (199 fish each) to the north end of Vancouver Island was miniscule--two fish were detected from one group and none from the other.

That result was similar to the detections for Snake inriver migrants. Of two 198-fish groups released in early May, only one smolt was detected from the first group and three from the second.

Barged fish from the Snake fared better, with eight detections in one group that was barged downriver June 7, adding up to an 8-percent survival rate to Vancouver Island, with a 3-percent survival rate from the second group, barged June 15.

In another controversial move, the council tabled a proposal to continue funding the years-long tagging and survival study of hatchery fish (Comparative Survival Study) overseen all this time by the Fish Passage Center.

Idaho's Danielson led the charge for more accountability from that project, and said only enough funding would be given to the sponsors to complete a report that covers the last 10 years of the study, as was requested earlier this year by the council's own scientific review board. The council will then give the report to the scientific board for review and recommendations.

Danielson said later that the hatchery fish would be tagged one way or another, because other entities like NOAA Fisheries rely on some of the pit-tagged hatchery fish in their own survival studies, but just who analyzes the data from these efforts may change to satisfy a need for an unbiased perspective.

Oregon members had objected to the holdup, and called for full funding ($1.757 million in 2007) of the controversial study, with added monies for tagging more lower river hatchery fish, as recommended by the science review panel. But the rest of the council felt otherwise, and wants the report within 90 days before any more money is doled out to sponsors.

Members also OK'd spending for another project that involved Canadians--nearly $600,000 over the next three years to investigate marine survival issues by collecting coded wire tags from Columbia River juvenile salmon off the B.C. coast. The council's science panel gave the project high marks, but neither the mainstem review team nor Oregon had supported it.

The council also gave the thumbs-up to a proposal by the Colville Tribes to evaluate different types of net traps and a floating fish wheel that would be used to develop live-capture methods for selective fisheries. The proposed study would also evaluate how well such gear can cull out hatchery fish from wild ones on spawning grounds. The council supported a $130,000 expenditure for next year, with more to come in future years if certain conditions are satisfied. That proposal was also not supported by the mainstem review team, which said its own tribal members had concerns about selective fisheries.

It's no secret that lower Columbia tribes do not support mass-marking hatchery fish so commercial and recreational harvesters can release wild, ESA-listed fish back to rivers. However, supporters say a fish wheel could help reduce the number of hatchery steelhead that return to spawning grounds above Wells Dam and dilute the fitness of wild ESA-listed fish. -Bill Rudolph

[2] Success Of Updated Hatchery Programs Still Unproven

By relying on salmon hatcheries to boost natural runs, including some listed under the Endangered Species Act, the region may be putting all its fish eggs in one basket, according to two recent peer-reviewed articles, whose authors say the jury's still out regarding potential benefits from the hatchery supplementation effort.

Supplementation uses local wild brood stock that are crossed with other wild fish. The progeny are raised in a hatchery for a time, and then usually out-planted in acclimation ponds where the young fish are allowed to migrate voluntarily. It's a strategy implemented in more than one-third of all Northwest hatchery programs.

One study (Araki et al.) in press at the journal Conservation Biology reports that a steelhead supplementation program in the Hood River gave a single-generation population boost to the natural steelhead numbers without "obvious" genetic consequences. However, the researchers said supplementation "should probably not be relied on as a permanent solution to dwindling natural populations," and that the offspring of breeding between hatchery fish (either traditionally raised or by supplementation) were less fit than researchers expected. "The long-term effects of supplementation remain untested," said the study, though the authors estimated each wild female taken into the hatchery for spawning generated four to 10 times as many wild-born adults as a female spawning in the wild does.

Wild fish advocate Bill Bakke, executive director of the Portland-based Native Fish Society, didn't agree with the findings of the Hood River study. "A closer examination of the data shows a decline in the fitness of hatchery fish," he told NW Fishletter.

Another article comparing hatchery and wild spring chinook says the results for the Yakima River are so far unclear, but changes observed in migration timing and fecundity in supplemented fish may reduce the overall fitness of the stock. The article (Knudsen et al.), published in the July 2006 Transactions of the American Fisheries Society, reported that "the most important observation to be derived from this study is that hatcheries do not produce fish that are identical to wild fish, even in a program designed to minimize the differences between the two production types."

The study went on to say that, "the implications for population productivity need to be better understood as we proceed with the use of conservation hatcheries to sustain salmon and steelhead populations."

But that hasn't stopped other high-level hatchery reviews, patterned after a big effort to reform Puget Sound hatcheries, from recommending the practice. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is using the methodology developed in the Sound study to review operations at all 21 of its facilities in the Columbia River Basin.

In announcing the draft results of a review of its Leavenworth hatchery complex in the upper Columbia, the USFWS review team is calling for some big changes. These include phasing out the Carson stock--a mixed stock of Snake and Columbia spring chinook trapped at Bonneville Dam in the 1950s and 1960s--in favor of using a native spring brood stock that is "integrated genetically" with a Wenatchee River ESA-recovery hatchery brood stock.

The initial review concluded that the spring chinook program at the Leavenworth Hatchery, which was built to mitigate effects of Grand Coulee Dam, is the only one of four programs that provides "significant" fisheries benefits to the Yakama Nation and recreational fishers in the mid-Columbia region, principally in the Icicle Creek region. It should be a "very" high priority, the initial review said. The facility produces several thousand chinook for tribal harvest every year, and several thousand more for recreational fishers.

The review team also recommended ending the spring chinook program at the Entiat Hatchery because it provides few fishery benefits, while an integrated summer chinook program would boost fish numbers in the Entiat River and mid-Columbia for both tribal and non-tribal fisheries.

The review also said the Entiat hatchery could help recover spring chinook in the region, a role also suggested for the Winthrop Hatchery on the Methow River. The Winthrop facility offers "significant potential" to reach both conservation and fishery goals for ESA-listed spring chinook and steelhead, according to the review. However, it won't work unless better ways are developed to trap natural-origin spring chinook adults for brood stock, monitor escapement of hatchery-origin chinook, and remove excess hatchery-origin steelhead from any supplementation effort in the Methow.

Another huge hatchery review, which will also look at harvest issues, has begun under the lead of NOAA Fisheries and facilitator Jim Waldo. This ambitious plan was kick-started to life last January by Jim Connaughton, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Addressing a salmon conference in Portland, Connaughton said the feds would scrutinize 180-odd hatchery programs in the Columbia Basin, closing those not contributing to the recovery of wild stocks, and maintaining others only if they didn't allow large numbers of ESA-listed fish to be caught incidentally.

In an Oct. 11 progress report, Waldo's group said it had completed a pilot review of hatcheries in the lower Columbia, a region with 40 different salmon and steelhead populations, and found risks could likely be reduced and benefits increased by "resizing" hatchery programs and improving brood-stock management, along with upgrading facilities.

Since hatchery fish can sustain higher levels of harvest than wild stocks, the group said this "will both reduce the potential adverse effects of too many hatchery fish on the spawning grounds and increase the value of hatchery production to fisheries."

The pilot review also recommended a brood-stock integration strategy that would meet both harvest goals and watershed-level recovery needs, but added that programs must be developed to identify both natural and hatchery-origin fish on spawning grounds or at the hatchery.

It said "segregated" hatchery programs, where fish are raised primarily to satisfy harvest obligations, should make sure all such fish are identified to keep less than 5 percent of them from reaching wild spawning areas, and suggested weirs, racks or other means of selective harvest be developed to keep excess hatchery fish from reaching spawning grounds.

The pilot review said one of the biggest management challenges would be to convert these "segregated" programs to "integrated" ones, in which fish would be raised in hatcheries to add to wild-fish abundance. The review said "current 'integrated' programs' are not properly integrated."

Both hatchery reviews will used a tool developed in the Puget Sound analyses by consultant Lars Mobrand called the 'All-H Analyzer,' referring to 'hatcheries, harvest, hydro, and hatcheries.' The tool was designed to keep track of assumptions and predict effects of conservation and fisheries as they change.

But critics of the All-H methodology say it relies more on professional opinion than the best available science, especially since the All-H tool includes a factor that estimates the effectiveness of hatchery fish spawning in the wild--where data is especially sparse. Supporters of the model say the tool allows managers to explore the implications of alternative management of the different H's, and make informed decisions on how best to balance their effects.

However, wild fish advocate Bakke says that although regional policymakers may change terms like "supplementation" for "integration," the problem is still the same. "These hatcheries will lead to the extinction of wild fish. They can increase production, but they can't increase productivity." -B. R.

[3] Snake Fall Chinook Return Beats 10-Year Average

There has been little fanfare this year for the Snake River fall chinook run, which though down from recent years, is still coming in strong compared to returns from the 1990s.

So far, about 8,000 chinook (hatchery plus wild) have returned, according to the count at Lower Granite Dam. That's nearly one-third below the average for the last six years, but still a major improvement over the 1990s--this year's count is 16 percent above the 10-year average

The overall numbers have been helped in recent years by significant returns of fish raised in hatcheries and out-planted in the Snake at several sites as juveniles, which has given fish managers major problems in trying to determine just how many returning chinook are truly wild. That's always been a tough question to answer, and the managers aren't ready this year either. In fact, they still haven't figured out how many wild fish made it back to Idaho in 2004 and 2005.

Wild chinook returns hadn't passed the 1,000-fish mark from 1975 until 2000, when 1,148 were estimated to have returned. Since then, the numbers have been even better, with a 5,000-fish return in 2001, 2,100 in 2002 and 3,900 in 2003.

With an interim recovery goal of 2,500 spawners set by NOAA Fisheries some years back, it seems the fall run is well on the road to recovery. And if the wild run is in the same proportion it showed in 2003, when the last estimate is available, it's likely to be around 2,600 fish--a number still beating the interim recovery goal in a year when returns for fall chinook throughout the Columbia River Basin are down.

In 1990, only 78 wild fall chinook were estimated to have returned to Idaho. Their numbers had declined steadily since the 1960s, after three-fourths of their habitat was blocked by construction of Idaho Power's Hells Canyon Complex. The stock took more hits when lower Snake dams were built.

Most biologists attribute the boost in the wild run to the success of a supplementation effort focused at Lyons Ferry, where fish are raised, and then trucked above Lower Granite to acclimation ponds. Fall chinook are also released from the Nez Perce Hatchery on the Clearwater River, and have been allowed to return to spawn there, where no fall chinook run previously existed, a situation likely due to the extremely cold water compared to traditional spawning grounds in the lower Snake.

In recent years, it's been discovered many of these fish stay in reservoirs and the estuary for the entire winter, and migrate before pit-tag detectors are turned on at dams in the spring. It has confounded survival studies for fall chinook, since many of the undetected fish were originally thought to have died.

But lately, researchers have examined scale samples from returning adults and found the late migrators seem to survive at a much greater rate than the sub-yearlings.

In a peer-reviewed report released as the first product by a new group of independent scientists taking over for the analyses previously performed by the Fish Passage Center, recent research has found that reservoir-type fall chinook "made up a small fraction of the juveniles (about 5 percent based on detection histories)," and "accounted for about half of the returning adults."

The report also found that while ocean-type (sub-yearling) chinook numbers roughly match those of reservoir-type fall chinook in the returns of hatchery-origin adults, they are more prevalent in the return of wild-born adults. -B. R.

[4] BiOp Plaintiffs Charge Feds With Changing Directions In Remand

At last Friday's status conference on the hydro BiOp remand case (NWF v. NMFS) in Portland, plaintiffs' attorney Todd True told U.S. District Judge James Redden his clients were concerned federal agencies were "changing horses in midstream," and sidestepping the federal agencies' so-called 'gap' analysis to estimate improvements needed to boost ESA-listed fish populations from current to viable levels.

True pointed to a memo from NOAA Fisheries regional head Bob Lohn that True said suggested the agency may be softening its analysis on proposed hydro operations and whether they jeopardize the survival and recovery of ESA-listed salmon. The memo said the agency might judge proposed mitigation measures sufficient as long as listed fish populations are "trending towards recovery" within "a reasonable time."

U.S. Department of Justice attorney Robert Gulley said the plaintiffs were just trying to draw the court into the issue, because they had not expressed any earlier concern about Lohn's memo during the normal workings of the collaborative policy group dealing with the remand.

Gulley urged the judge not to even comment, but to let the collaborative process continue in the Policy Work Group. He said the memo doesn't detract from the feds' commitment to the conceptual framework outlined at the beginning of the process. He pointed out that filling the gap leads to delisting the stock, not avoiding jeopardy, so concern over not reaching these goals over the 10-year term of the BiOp is misplaced.

There was also discussion over memo language that said the feds' "trending toward recovery" idea would satisfy Redden if the agencies' analysis finds the proposed action, along with other federal and non-federal actions, would reverse any trend towards extinction.

If fish numbers were going up, BiOp actions would not be jeopardizing listed stocks, and would more than satisfy ESA language that says actions are permissible if they "do not reduce appreciably" survival and recovery of listed species.

Critics of the feds' memo said later it would put the government on the spot for making sure all the runs keep going up, no matter what, when dips could occur from other factors like a downturn in ocean conditions.

Gulley told the judge there was a semantics problem, and the term "gap filling" was being used in a number of ways. He said the feds don't believe they are required to get the gaps filled in the BiOp.

But Redden said his duty is to see if the next BiOp meshes with the ESA, and if it doesn't, he will "dispose of it" and take "more dramatic actions." -B. R.

[5] Washington Says To Limit Consumption Of Puget Sound Chinook

The state of Washington recommended last week that resident chinook (blackmouth) from Puget Sound should be eaten only twice a month because of PCB levels found in the fish. But state health officials said other chinook salmon are OK to eat once a week.

The health advisory put Washington more in line with some other states with PCB problems. Resident chinook in the Great Lakes, for example, contain PCB levels of about one part per million--that's about ten times more than the highest levels found in local chinook, and still below FDA acceptable limits for commercial fish (2 parts per million).

PCB levels in fish have declined dramatically in the Great Lakes since the early 1970s when high-level predators like walleye pike contained about 25 ppm. The pike now sport PCB levels about 10 times less.

But consumers are still confused after several years of a concerted anti-farmed salmon campaign where supporters cited EPA information that calls for a lower acceptable PCB levels than the FDA. The EPA recommended a lower allowable level of PCBs for edible fish, 0.1 ppm.

Recent Indiana and Illinois sport fish consumption advisories say its OK to eat one meal a month for fish with PCB levels between .21 and 1.00 ppm. Most chinook from Puget Sound are well below that, containing around .05 ppm, while farmed salmon from Chile contains only about .02 ppm.

Washington governor Chris Gregoire used the press release from the state's Department of Health to stump for cleaning up Puget Sound, though it will take decades for PCB levels to decline by much, even though the organic compounds were outlawed in the late 1970s.

"Many fish from Puget Sound remain a smart choice for the dinner table; however, this news is another sign that Puget Sound is sick and we must take action now," said Gregoire. "The Puget Sound Partnership is tackling this challenge head on."

With state legislators headed to Olympia in January with a large budget surplus to deal with, supporters of the cleanup effort are hoping to get their share, and have rolled the Sound's salmon recovery effort into that effort.

But it won't be cheap. In the PSP draft recommendations released two weeks ago, the billions add up quickly, on top of the several billion spent already by state and federal agencies. That includes another $500 million in state spending to clean up contaminated sites over the next 12 years, about half the public-sector cost. Private spending will be even more.

The salmon recovery effort itself is pegged at nearly $2 billion over the next 10 years, with another $2 billion to reduce stormwater runoff and improve its quality.

The next upgrades of Puget Sound treatment plants might cost as much as $5 billion, says the PSP, which could nearly double if treatment included reuse and reclamation.

But that isn't all. Another $3 billion over 10 years would be needed to reduce non-point pollution sources.

So PSP big shots, including local salmon czar Bill Ruckelshaus, will be heading to Olympia soon to begin the fundraising effort. In other venues, Ruckelshaus has suggested a small addition to the sales tax to generate revenue for salmon recovery efforts. -B. R.

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